Sick Report

Mama and Rye have the flu (temperature not stomach), Peanut is recovering but not 100%. BigE is tired but we think this is due to the week he had. I guess we'll see in the morning.

Dada A O K. Maybe that flu shot works.

We scream for Ice Cream we all Scream

We're sick. Yup everyone. Well maybe not Arnie but you never know. Peanut has a virus and rash. BigE started some ill feelings and temperature this evening. Mama has been nauseous. I have strep. I'm down to penicillin and 4 or 5 extra strength Tylenol. All things considered lately that is pretty. I think that also makes me the healthiest to boot too!

Yeah Strep.

Some pics of the sweet three coming. But first to bed.

Disney Day 5

By this point in the trip bigE was tired of walking and preffer to ride in the stroller.

We were glad that we brought both.


We started the day in "the seas" with the Finding Nemo ride, we all really enjoyed this one. It is an indoor ride that take thru an aquarium looking for Nemo. After the ride we looked around the aquarium and saw Dolphins, fish, seahorses...


While we were at Epcot they were having theid Spring Flower Festival. Here are some pics




Then we went on a few more rides and headed to see the Countries of the World Exibits. We stopped and had pastry in France and then went for one last ride before taking the monorail and Ferry to dinner.
Dinner was at the Whispering Canyon Restaurant at The Wilderness Lodge. This was everyones favorite meal. The food was quite good and the waiters were a lot of fun. They Start by telling you the menu and ask the next table to recite dessert. Then they make you yell a phrase and the next table gets to judge your enthusiasm. Once our meal arrived we asked for ketchup. Our waiter yells KETCHUP!! and every child in the restaurant runs and bring you EVERY bottle of ketchup in the restaurant. Now you have very little room on your table until another innocent family requests ketchup.

Disney Day 3

Today we stayed at the hotel and went swimming in the morning.




Then we decided to go for a boat ride to Downtown Disney which is mostly a shopping area. At the request of BigE we went to the Lego Store first.

Serpent made entirely of lego.


Lego T-Rex.


Knight BigE playing at the Lego Store


After hitting in a few other stores we stopped to have a late lunch at the T-Rex Cafe, a Prehistoric Resraurant. The Dinosaurs Roar every 20 minutes or so, BigE really didn't appreciate this much.



When we were done eating we headed to the Build-a-Dino shop where BigE picked out a Dino (a Stegasaurus), helped stuff him, named him (Steggie) and then took him home, Birth certificate and all. BigE has been sleeping with him ever since.

We all headed back to the hotel on the boat but not before designing a custom T-Shirt.

This is a photo that Mama took of our hotel from the boat. This is one of about 25 buildings on our resort.

Disney Day 2

Day 2 we went to the Animal Kingdom. I think that this was everyone's favorite Park. We started of with a Character breakfast, this means an all you care to eat buffet with Disney characters circulating the room. Here are some pics of the characters that we met during breakfast.

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Then we headed out to do some of the rides in Dinoland I think we only ended up going on the Tricera Top spin, Big E was too short for the other ride there. Then we went to see the Lion King Show, WOW this was Mama's favotite thing during the trip. It was Awesome!!

Then Mama went on the Everest Roller Coaster while BigE, Peanut and Dada went to the Boneyard playground. Everest was well...intense, Mama love it! Here are some pics of us at the playground.



After that we went on the Safari. We all loved it!! It was really amazing to see the animals that close with out any barriers in the way.



After all that we went back to the hotel for a dip in the pool.

Disney

Where to start? I guess I'll start with day 1, Magic Kingdom. we went to the Magic kingdom for half the day we did a bunch of the rides and then headed back to the hotel for a swim/nap. Then out to the campground for Mickeys Backyard BBQ.

Here is Peanut ready to hit Disney.

Here is BigE in front of Cinderella's Castle.


Some pics of us on the Mad Tea Party ride.



Mickeys Backyard BBQ

Disney Sneak Peak

Two quick pics from the Disney trip. As Mama said tonight. "Oh Yeah I* have to get on those Disney posts"

(Based on Peanut's look I wonder what WTF is in baby talk)

* (It might not have been I, maybe we, but I'll say I heard I)

More Tubing

Here's a video of BigE and myself riding together on our day of tubing

Christmas

Our excited boy woke up at 8:00 on christmas morning and the first thing he did was open his baby sisters stocking for her.


After that he opened the big box with HIS name on it and was excited to find the Pirate Ship that he had asked Santa for. Boy was he excited!!



Then he opened a gift for his baby sister.


Here is Pineapple, Nanny, Mommy,and Big E opening gifts.

Here are Nanny and Poppy enjoying their gifts.


A shot of Pinapple, Daddy, Big E, Auntie K and Peanut with the spoils of the day.

Semseter 4 Done

[Insert Usual clap trap about being busy.]

Done the fourth semester as of 9:58 pm tonight. Man that feels good. Give or take a few percentage points I'm 44% done. Sone I might even have to map out a post degree plan.

The Family Photo

Pulled this out of the Pumpkin patch visit. Thought it would be nice just to post the photo of the family.

BigE's First Trip to the Hospital

Here's a quick video of BigE's visit to the hospital to see his baby sister.

Dada has just Finished Year ONE!

Man that feels like such a long time and such a little accomplishment. However I have finished the last of the summer courses. It was dragged out a day because I had to sign the cover sheet acknowledging the ethics code. I forgot to do that on the first paper I handed. So I had to drive back downtown to pass in another one. Ughh.

Where's Christmas Vacation Been?

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, normally a Christmas staple on the ol' tube, has gone AWOL. I haven't seen it once. It's not Christmas without Christmas Vacation running a dozen times during the holiday season.

Icing the Rink

We've had a lot of snow lately. Well for around here we have. Funny when I read Coldest winter in 15 years I thought great that will make it easy to freeze the rink.

What I didn't realize was that the other comment in the article was also going to apply. Higher then normal level of snowfall. Snowfall? I figured that was for those in milder climates.

Well in the end I had waited and waited hoping wind, or warm weather might have cleaned up the rink. Nope. So, since I had some time between exams and the big party, I figured it was time to get started. 3 hours of shoveling later I finally had the rink clear. And by finally I mean FINALLY.

It was 11:00 so I figured I had some time to get a coat of ice down before hitting the sack. Then I saw the timer on the tap. You know those mechanical timers that let you turn on the sprinkler and have it shut off after so much time. So the tap is wide open. Guess what -15'c temperatures did to that? I ended up going in to boil the kettle a couple of times till I finally got the water flowing. I even had to use a wrench to get the timer off the tap. For a moment I thought the whole thing was going to come off the house.

Now I'm sitting in the dark waiting to move the sprinkler to a new location. So far so good. Things are doing better now that the ibuprofen is in my system.

PS Trying to avoid walking on the plastic and newly formed ice gave me the idea to use the long reach paint pole to move the sprinkler around. Normally I have to climb around the edges in the snow to get the movement.

One Fine Loaf of Bread

We've been using the bread machine to make pizza dough for a while. Usually with pretty good results. I've also used the dough setting to make decent rolls on holidays.

A couple of times I have meant to make bread dough. Roll it up, and freeze it. Then when you want a fresh loaf pull it out before you go to bed, put in the oven, and set the timer so it cooks for first thing in the morning. Fresh bread first thing in the morning. I'd say the results are pretty good.

Well what was funny the other day with this particular loaf? I covered it with a tea towel to rise in the oven. I was making it fresh. Then as we rushed out the door I thought "Oh heck I'll just set the timer so it's done when I get back".

Turned out I forgot to remove the tea towel. It was baked for 30 minutes at 350'c. Not a burn mark. Imagine my surprise when I opened the oven door wanting to see the finished product when I saw this blue cloth. "What the he...."

Woopsie

A Week with No Posts?

Bugger off.

I finished my last assignment for the semester last night. 11 pages of regression analysis. Now there is only two exams left. Not that isn't much of a good excuse because after that there will be Christmas or New Year or whatever.

My Fun New Software

okay it's getting late butI can't wait to post this. I am writing this with my fancy new software. It's its Dragon Naturally Speaking standard 9.0. Yes that's right, voice recognition software. And it seems pretty kick ass. While software can seem to keep up with my speech. I keep stopping, and watching it process I'm saying.

I've worked my way through the training package that came with the software. It seems to work pretty well. I only had to make a couple of minor adjustments.

Everything I have typed has been dictated through the headset.
Man is a lot of fun. But my poor little Celeron and M Laptop is working hard to keep up. I can't have too many processes running running, or else things them to slow down a little. Then again maybe I have to stop watching the status window as it process is what I'm saying.

For software with little training, on my peculiar voice, I think it's done pretty well.

This bit I typed to the dictation box. Which is a little tool, as well as you do enter text into a weird programs that are not fully supported by the software. I can't say the name, because that seems to trigger some keyword on the menu. But you can talk into the dictation box and when you're ready. You say the word transfer.

So far it's done pretty good. Until it's fully trained up have to remember to speak clearly and have a controlled pace. When I do that. It seems to do much better. Now I am starting to speed up in my speech. It seems to be keeping up if I don't keep looking back for it. I just need to remember when to say period or comma ( I had to type those words by hand).

just to reiterate, I am running on a Celeron m laptop with 768 MB of RAM. It's pretty neat how it knew to turn megabytes into MB. I have a couple of applications open. I have Firefox, Thunderbird, and iTunes all running right now. But that is about all my little laptop can handle. I would say any computer bought in the last two years should run the software pretty well.

Although have to admit, I don't think I've been a completely give up on the keyboard just yet. Some of the editing can get a little tedious through voice commands. but I don't think, at least for this version of the product, that that is the purpose of the software. At least know when I get Momma trained upon the software. She should have no excuses not to read up some blog posts.

Jeepers look at the length of this post. Maybe this dictation thing is not going to pay off. It's not like I'm getting paid by the word. Anyways, good night.

Oh and one more thing. Some of the advanced versions of the software let you do some powerful macros. The standard version only let you record a simple macros that don't contain any special punctuation. The nice thing here is that I can type "http://theBusseyFamily.ca" by saying just the letters t, b, and f.

UPDATE: I left most of the errors in so you can get a sense of how it did.

Two Courses Down

First there was one. Now there is two done.

This one was even squishier then the last. But there's nothing like a nice 60 page hand in to add some impressive weight to a mountain ... of well something. 10 pages about the group done by the group. Then each person does 6 pages about them plus one or two on the evaluation on the other group members.

That leaves somewhere between 20 and 300 courses to go.

Coffee is Good for You

From the Daily Telegraph Drinking coffee 'is good for the heart'

One to three cups of coffee a day may protect people from heart disease and strokes, according to research which contradicts numerous studies that have suggested that coffee is bad for you

And really the truth behind all this consumption stuff and how to live your life:

Dr Sarah Jarvis, a fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners said: "This is a message about moderation. Too much exercise, too much coffee or too much alcohol are bad. In moderation they are beneficial."